Amazon Fire TV teardown reveals a beastly set-top box

Amazon’s announcement of the Fire TV on Wednesday didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone keeping track of the countless leaks, but the specifications of the device did manage to cause a stir. iFixit has given the Fire TV its standard teardown treatment in order to take a look at the parts that power a set-top box three times as powerful as the Apple TV, and to see how easy it would be to repair.

The Fire TV features a quad-core 1.7GHz Qualcomm processor, Adreno 320 GPU, 2GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage, 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. On the back of the device are five ports: a DC jack, HDMI output, Optical Audio, Ethernet and USB 2.0.

As for repairability, iFixit awards Amazon’s set-top box a 6 out of 10, praising the clean construction and separate power supply, but noting that the heat sink is nearly impossible to remove and all the vital pieces are included on a single board. In other words, don’t let Gary Busey inside your Fire TV.